Social media is clearly a powerful tool that can fuel an artist’s popularity growth, but too many have a “set it and forget it” mentality. If you actually want more people following you online, you have to do what needs to be done to make that happen. If everyone or almost everyone on your band’s social media page is also on your personal friends list, you need to read this.

First, have an artist page. It seems obvious, but don’t try to use your personal page. It doesn’t work and you can’t ever figure out whether or not what you’re doing is effective. It may seem like a good idea if you have a lot of contacts but it doesn’t work. Just don’t do it!

Once you have your artist page up, post lots of pictures and tag them all with everyone in them (and even everyone present at the event that you can think of). By doing this, you become visible all over your network and also the ones for the people you’re tagging. If the location has a page (most do) make sure and include it. Every picture is an opportunity to vastly increase your page views (and followers) if you take full advantage of them.

Setup artist pages on all of the social media networks you use. Facebook is by far the most visited, but Twitter and LinkedIn (second and third most visited) are growing fast. There are many other sites as well. Just remember, you have to maintain all of these pages so don’t just go out of control setting up pages that you won’t have time to keep updated. An artist page that isn’t updated may as well not even exist.

Link all of your social media pages. Every page you set up provides this option. Make sure your Twitter followers can find you on Facebook and vice versa. Network your networks.

Set up events as your artist page (instead of doing it from your personal page as just a person). You want the link to your artist page to show up in as many places as possible, and if you set up any events as your artist page, that just adds one more link. The key to getting more followers is getting more views; and maximizing page links makes that happen.

Pin your next event to the top of your page so that it’s the first thing people will see when they go there. You’re not going to link very much to the event itself so it’s important to keep it right there at the top. You want all links going to the page, not the event. If you link to the event, people can bypass your page altogether so they’ll never even get a chance to like your page, and your connection to that person (and by extension, their network) will be lost.

Websites such as Facebook will provide extensive demographic data for non-personal pages. Use it. You can see average age, gender, location, and lots of other data on your page’s viewers. Additionally, feedback information is provided, such as how many people viewed each post, which posts and post-types get the most interaction, etc. Use this data to experiment with the types of posts you make on your page. Focus on the things that are working and expand on them. It won’t always be what you expect so pay attention!